The major proponent of the Village prose movement, noted for his quirky, folklore-rooted style of writing, Krupin is best known for his 1980 Novy Mir-published satirical novel Zhivaya Voda (Aqua Vitae).

Krupin joined the Sovremennik Publishers as an editor and at one point became its partorg, but was fired after the publication of Georgy Vladimov's Three Minutes of Silence.

In 1980 the satirical short novel Aqua Vitae, dealing with the degradation of the Soviet rural community, steeped in mass alcoholism, made Krupin a well-known author.

His 1980s works, notably Bokovoy veter (The Side Wind, 1982) and Povest o vom, kak... (The Tale of How..., 1985), examined hardships of life in the Soviet village.

Outraged by the destruction of the Russian Parliament in October 1993, he reacted by the series of articles ("The Cross and the Void", "The Bitter Grief", and others) published by Nash Sovremennik and Moskva.